In 1973 he sent me his last book, The Second Struggle: Speeches and Writings 1962–1972. It was printed in East Germany, and the cover carried the 1956 photograph of him in Woodford Square in Port of Spain, standing at a microphone on the bandstand, before the crowd. He had inscribed the book to me as to “a fellow humanist.” And he had added, “To understand that is at any rate to make a beginning.” A touch of the old charm, the way with words. It didn’t mean anything, but I was moved to see his shaky hand.
It was a dreadful book. It had nothing of the brilliance and the underground emotions of his article in the Russian magazine. In spite of the cover photograph I doubted whether many of the pieces had been speeches. There was an undercurrent of defeat and rancour. There was little subtlety, no sly humour. In certain articles he used stock communist words—“opportunists,” “petit-bourgeois nationalists,” “reformists,” “Blanquists”—almost in a personal way, to denounce his Caribbean enemies, the successful politicians, the men in Government House.
The decline (which might have been partly due to age) was more noticeable in the hack work he had chosen to reprint, the pieces in which, as a colonial, he compared non-European communist countries with imperialist client states — Kazakhstan, for instance, with the Philippines or Pakistan, Cuba with Brazil or Venezuela. Official facts and figures for the communist country, of rising industrial production, of rising numbers at school and universities; and then a simple expository account (like something taken from a simple encyclopaedia) of the backwardness of the Philippines or Brazil or Iran, population figures and areas in square kilometres always given, where feudal landlords owned much of the country and almost no one went to school; the whole essay locked together with a couple of academic-looking tables and a quotation (excessively documented) from an unknown “professor” or “doctor.” Did he believe in those articles? Or were they written by a man who knew that such articles only filled space in official magazines?
Thinking now of his decay, into which he had been led by his cause, the cause that had appeared years before to rescue him from racial nonentity, thinking of that and his poverty, his dependence on others, for lodging and livelihood, I thought how strange it was that he had turned out to be like the people he had written about in his very first book, the one that had lain unread at the bottom shelf of the cupboard in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain.
HE HAD written in that book about some of the Spanish-American or Venezuelan revolutionaries before Bolívar, and he had concentrated on those with Trinidad connections.
For some years after it had been detached from Venezuela and the Spanish empire and had become a British territory, Trinidad was used as a base by revolutionaries on the mainland, across the Gulf of Paria.
One embittered Spanish official, a refugee in Trinidad, had plotted with an associate on the mainland to start a slave revolt in Venezuela. A hopeless idea: Trinidad was still full of Venezuelans and a number of them were Spanish agents. And then this plot, like so many Caribbean slave plots, was betrayed to the authorities by a slave. The rebels were hanged and quartered, and the quarters of the hanged were displayed on the highway over the mountains between La Guaira on the coast and the inland valley of Caracas. This attempt at revolution never really became famous: everything happened too fast.
Miranda was better known. He had left Venezuela early and had travelled about Europe and the United States. He gave himself the title of Count and got to know important people; in revolutionary France he even became a general. In exile he began to improve on the country he had come from. The blacks and mulattoes of the slave estates receded; the people of Venezuela became Incas, the original rulers of the continent, nature’s gentlemen, as noble as anything the eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed of. These were the people Miranda represented; all they needed was freedom. In middle age, finally, he came to Trinidad, his base, to start his revolution across the Gulf. He had money, a ship, arms, all he had said he needed. He also had the prospectuses of the London merchants who had subsidized him for years; he had promised to scatter these about Venezuela, after he had liberated it. He didn’t liberate Venezuela; he released a kind of anarchy, and was destroyed by the colonial pettiness he had run away from half a lifetime before. It had always been there, waiting for him.
In order to write this book Lebrun had had to do some original work in the Venezuelan archives. His purpose in writing the book in the 1930s had been to prove his old point about the revolutionary nature of the islands; to give himself and his ideas a great past, to link the revolutionary stir of the 1930s to the stir caused in the region by the French Revolution; to lift the islands from the end-of-empire smallness in which they had been becalmed since the abolition of slavery, and to attach them once again to the great historical processes of the continent. He wished, above all, to make the point that revolutions do not simply happen: they have to be prepared for, the people have to be educated, there has to be a revolutionary political party.
All that labour, and I doubt whether a dozen people in Trinidad or Venezuela had read his book. No one at school had read it. I hadn’t read it; I had handled it only as a book, a wonderful object.
I read it one afternoon in the London Library not long after I had looked at The Second Struggle. I would have been the first person for ten years perhaps to take it from its shelf.
What a spirit was locked in its pages! Always there, waiting to speak to me. In Trinidad in 1948 I wonder how much I would have been able to make of it. Not a great deal. I would have been then too much part of that end-of-empire smallness Lebrun had talked about. I would have been as baffled by it as I was when I was told that the writer was a revolutionary and on the run somewhere in the United States. I needed the passage of time, distance, experience, to understand what he had written.
I was aware of the room in which I was reading, in London — how changed from the London in which the book had been published and, as the printed sticker said, presented to the London Library “by the publishers.” It wasn’t only that I had changed since I had seen the book at school. The world had changed; my presence in the London Library was an aspect of that change.
Thinking of the ironies in Lebrun’s life, that at the end he should have been like the people he had written about in his first book, and feeling almost superstitiously that there was a circularity in human lives, I began to wonder where in my own writings I had marked out regions of the spirit to which I was to return. Just as Lebrun, who had sought to submerge his racial feelings in the universality of his political beliefs, had had that dream removed and in old age had been returned unprotected to heaven knows what private alarms.
I thought of his capacity for talk. That gift had opened doors for him all his life. But there was hysteria there, as well, the hysteria of the islands, expressed most usually in self-satire, jokeyness, fantasy, religious excess, sudden spasms of cruelty. I thought of the burning of Charlie King at the time of the strike in Trinidad, and the almost religious, sacrificial regard for the victim ever afterwards. I thought of the taunting of Foster Morris in the old wooden house with the distorted shadows cast by oil lamps. I thought of the black man in the bowler who had stepped out of the bus queue in Regent Street to show me photographs of his wife and house. How could one enter the emotions of a black man as old as the century?